Apple iPad event recap

What a day it has been. Apple released more software and hardware updates today than any other day in its history. So if you missed it, here are just a few things to take a look at.

iPad Air & iPad Mini

The newest iPad is called the iPad Air now. It’s lighter and slimmer, hence the name. Both iPads come in white/silver and black/space grey and the largest size memory has been bumped to 128GB. The starting price for a 16GB version is $499 for the iPad Air and $399 for the retina iPad Mini. The Air will be available November 1st and the mini sometime in November.

The iPad mini features a brand new retina display. This was the biggest feature requested by the Apple community and today Apple delivered. There was still no gold iPad mini but I would not be surprised if Apple added one down the road this year.

OSX Mavericks

Apple updated OSX to 10.9 and what an update it is. They added Maps and iBooks as well as finder tabs and iCloud keychain. There are tons of new features that will be very useful and will disrupt a few existing apps. The biggest thing about this upgrade though was the price. Apple announced that all computers would be eligible to upgrade for free. You can get it here.

There are greater increases in energy efficiency which Apple claims will increase the battery life on existing Macbook lines as well as make programs run faster and smoother using things like “compressed memory” and OpenCL. Learn more about these features here.

iLife and iWork

Both suites of apps were updated today with new looks that are a lot more iOS 7 friendly and they both got the new treatment of being free.

iMovie received a complete overhaul of the look and feel. They also added new features to make it easy to speed up and slow down video, especially video from the new iPhone 5S high speed camera.

GarageBand added an amazing new drummer tool which helps you automatically add drum tracks to any riff or song you want. You can choose from different genres of drummers and each drummer even comes with its own little bio.

iPhoto added new editing features and easier sharing right from the app as well as a clean new look that, like all the apps in the iWork and iLife suite, look the same on the iPhone, iPad or Macbook.

iWork got a huge overhaul in the look and feel of the apps. Keynote received new animations and transitions as well as a clean look. The same applies to Pages and Numbers. The iWork suite was aging and it was starting to show but now with the features such as interactive charts and iCloud integration and many more small changes this should make the iWork suite very useful again.

Retina Macbook Pro

Both the 13 and 15 inch MacBooks were updated today with new graphic chips and new processors, just as we predicted. What we didn’t see coming was the $200 price drop on both models, bringing the 15″ under $2000 for the first time.

Here are some of the specs

[av_one_half first]

13″

2.4GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor

4GB of 1600MHz DDR3L onboard memory

128GB of storage

Intel Iris Graphics

Two Thunderbolt 2 ports (up to 20 Gbps)

802.11ac Wi‑Fi wireless networking

Up to 9 hours wireless web

[/av_one_half]

[av_one_half]

15″

2.0GHz quad-core Intel Core i7 processor

8GB of 1600MHz DDR3L onboard memory

256GB of storage

Intel Iris Pro Graphics

Two Thunderbolt 2 ports (up to 20 Gbps)

802.11ac Wi‑Fi wireless networking

Up to 8 hours wireless web

[/av_one_half]

Mac Pro

More info came out about the Mac Pro today about all its amazing capabilities and the sheer beastliness of this machine. I would highly suggest you just learn more here.

iOS Apps

Along with the iWork suite and the iLife suite, the corresponding iOS apps were also updated to have the same look and feel, as well as new features that harness the power of the A7 chipset. Like the rest of the day, these apps will also be free with all new iPhones and iPads.

Apple has just uploaded the presentation from today which you can watch here.

Were you pleased with today’s Apple event? If not, what would you have liked to see?